The Decider-In-Chief has decided, now shut-up.

“This is a little bit of a nonissue,” Perino said at a briefing dominated by the issue. Cheney is not subject to the executive order, she said, “because the president gets to decide whether or not he should be treated separately, and he’s decided that he should.”

In the executive order, Bush emphasized the importance of the public’s right to know what its government was doing, particularly in the global campaign against terrorism. “Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government,” the executive order said.

But from the start, Bush considered his office and Cheney’s exempt from the reporting requirements, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in an interview Friday.